GRTV: Splinter Cell: Blacklist

Game director Patrick Redding sat down with Gillen McAllister to discuss one of the best received new titles at E3.

On Sam Fisher and the story:

"It's been six months since the end of Conviction, and Sam is at the beginning of a new phase in his life when we are confronted with this new threat which is the threat of this blacklist. This escalating series of attacks basically coupled around an ultimatum to the US to get your troops to retreat from foreign soil altogether. This attack is what inspires the president to create this new covert ops organisation - blacker than black - which is designated fourth echelon. That gives you a little bit of a hint of things that might have happened since the last game and obviously there is only one man who can possibly run this and that's Sam Fisher."

"Obviously we're going to have a bunch of reveals on the story in the coming months so I don't want to give away too many of the secrets. I think what's great for us is the structure, the blacklist is a very specific kind of threat, and a upfront statement of we're hitting these targets and there's nothing you can do about it except comply with our demands. That's a very frightening kind of threat and creates that feeling of helplessness that none of us want and the idea that Sam Fisher is the guy who can go in there and confront something like that is at the key of it."

"For us Conviction allowed us to introduce some ideas which were super important to us, which our fans also embraced, but we also knew that the next logical expression of that is that we need to have that fluidity, we needed to keep things moving forward, to have that momentum. So that whether Sam is being ultra stealthy and staying in the shadows or he's taking the more direct confrontational approach there is always that feeling of forward movement of momentum and of engaging the next person."